This site is part of the Informa Connect Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 3099067.

search

Small Robot Company launches Tom v4

Posted by on 28 November 2022
Share this article

Small Robot Co (SRC), a British agritech start-up, has launched its next generation Tom v4 monitoring robots.

Tom v4 rolled out onto 20 farms in November to deliver SRC’s first commercial services for Per Plant Farming. Services will roll out to a total of around 50 farms throughout the coming year, with additional farm services in Suffolk and Shropshire. A further 100 farmers have signed EOIs for 50,000+ hectares potential future service.

Meanwhile, pending corporate customer trials include nutrient company Mosaic, research centre James Hutton Institute and fresh produce company G’s Growers. Five corporate trials are pending for 2022-2023, with a further seven in negotiation.

According to SRC, Tom v4’s per plant data has huge potential for the corporate agri-science industry. The robot’s capabilities include precisely geolocated per plant data, precise plant counts, and high-resolution plant images, with the opportunity for every field to become a trial plot. Tom v4 delivers a ground sample distance of 0.28mm per pixel, giving Tom the capability to see individual water droplets on leaves and early signs of disease outbreak.

Tom v4 is also a major technical advancement: Tom’s new modular design is also the basis for Dick and Harry. SRC’s new modular robot architecture enables its robots to share 80 percent of the hardware, 90 percent of the electronics and all of the deployed software. This platform will allow SRC to scale internationally to cover much larger farms. It also provides SRC with a configurable platform to deploy multiple technologies and applications. Examples such as non-chemical weeding and precision spraying are being progressed in trials.

The first per plant services from the Tom v4 monitoring robot will optimize farmers’ existing sprayer equipment to reduce costs and inputs, by treating only the problem areas. Tom v4 scans the crop to a level of detail that identifies individual plants, gathering data on plant and weed distribution to determine the optimum treatment path. This information is used to inform variable rate fertilizer applications and to spot-apply herbicides through nozzle control and sectional control sprays.

Future services currently in research and development include grassweed mapping, with out-of-row crop detection as the first stage; robotic non-chemical weeding; disease identification and fungicide treatment sprayer export; and soil sampling and insights. SRC will take plant density information, augmenting this with other metrics, such as biomass assessment, soil insights, physiology, tiller count, growth stage and weather, to support decisions on when and how much fertilizer to apply, and exactly where it’s needed, optimizing plant nutrition.

Read more about Small Robot Company and its Per Plant Farming concept, here.

Read the SEP/OCT 2022 issue of New AG International, free to view here.

Share this article

Sign up for Agtech email updates

keyboard_arrow_down